Over the past six months, I’ve been working with my friend and colleague Rich Gower on a report for Tearfund, the Christian development NGO, entitled The Restorative Economy: Completing our Unfinished Millennium Jubilee – and today, the report is finally published. Here’s the summary, and here’s the full report (we also have a comment piece on the Guardian today, which you’ll find here).

The process of writing this report has been especially close to my heart, and has left me at the end feeling that I want to devote much more of my energy to the massive task of movement building and values shifting that lies ahead of us. I’ve been working in and around the multilateral system for nearly a decade, and like many of my friends and colleagues in that world, have frequently felt acute frustration at the postage stamp-sized amount of political space that currently exists for solutions on the scale we need, both internationally and at home in the UK.

This report is an attempt to start thinking about what a new approach to that challenge might look like – across four chapters. The first one sets out a snapshot of where we are: in many ways a golden age for development, but one in which three huge challenges – environmental unsustainability, growing inequality, and the millions and millions of people still left behind as globalisation accelerates apace – remain ours to solve.

In chapter two, Rich and I set out the need for a different theory of influence. Many of us who work in the fight for development, justice, and sustainability have I think been feeling the limits of theories of change that rely primarily on ‘insider lobbying’. We take that here as our starting point for asking what an alternative approach might look like: one that places much more emphasis on how we build new grassroots coalitions, transform values, and tell each other much deeper stories about where we are, how we got here, where we might choose to go next, and who we really are.

Chapter three then explores the potential to discover such deeper stories in theology. All of us witnessed how the biblical idea of jubilee was able to animate a transformative civil society movement fifteen years ago, and proved powerfully resonant far beyond the church groups that formed Jubilee 2000’s core. As someone who worked in the UK government at the point when the 2005 Gleneagles summit concluded its debt relief deal, I still have to pinch myself when I remember that the average low income country’s debt fell from nearly 75% of its GDP in 2000 to just over 25% today – something that happened partly because of politicians, but much more fundamentally because of a coalition of millions of ordinary people, united by a shared story.

In this light, we argue, it’s important to remember that the once-a-generation jubilee festival described in the Old Testament was never about debt relief alone. When you go back to the original texts, as we did at some length in the course of researching this report, you find that they were also about environmental restoration. Ensuring that there was real attentiveness to enabling people living in poverty to meet their basic needs. And ensuring that concentrations of wealth did not build up from one generation to another. All three of these themes are of course fundamental to where we find ourselves today, in 2015. (And as friends working on the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals will already have spotted, they’re central to that agenda too.)

So in a very real sense, the work we began in 2000 – our millennium jubilee – remains a work in progress. If we can complete it, then our kids will enjoy the kind of future that I know I want for my children – Isabel, 5, and Kit, 2. And in chapter 4, Rich and I set out what we think that would look like in practice.

We argue that it starts with the changes that all of us need to make in our own lives. This is partly because of the direct impact that such changes can have, of course, but we think the main issue here is something to do with the quality of intention that movements exemplify. Wherever movements not only demand but live out the change they want to see in the world, there’s a raw power there that can exert the kind of non-linear effect on politics that progressives so urgently want to see.

But ultimately the decision about the future we want has to be made by all of us collectively, as well as each of us individually. So chapter 4 ends with a ten big ideas for far-reaching policy changes of the kind that we think have this transformative power. The ideas cover a very broad waterfront – from reforming the financial system to global climate policy, and from how we use aid internationally to how our tax system works at home.

We don’t by any means think the proposals we set out are the last word on the subject. But if they can play even just a small part in catalysing a serious conversation, among all of us, about the choices we have in what we bequeath to our kids, then I think I speak for all of Tearfund’s fabulous advocacy team, Rich, and I when I say that we’ll be more than happy with the result.

As my regular post-2015 update from the invaluable Rachel Quint at the Hewlett foundation reminded me today, there have been (at least) six separate proposals for a global partnership for development data over the last two years. The idea has a lot of fans out there, with supporters ranging from the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia (in the High Level Panel’s report), the chief statisticians of South Africa, India, Canada and Hungary (in the IEAG report), data experts in the World Bank, the UN Secretary General (in his ‘synthesis report’) and academics from institutions including the Centre for Global Development, ODI, SDSN and NYU

And so. Will there actually be a global partnership for development data? I hope so, for two reasons.

Firstly, there are the specific and practical things that a partnership could do.

These are many, but three stand out for me. The first is pretty basic. It was a source of constant frustration, while I was working on the IEAG report, to be hearing about some fantastic and inspirational initiatives to solve problems with data going on in one part of the world, while at the same time, hearing people in a different place lamenting their inability to solve the exact same problem. Something that systematically shared experiences and knowledge between countries and organisations could save time, save money, and perhaps even save lives.

A second big problem at global level is a lack of shared standards. Too much time and money is wasted reverse engineering data created in one system to make it fit another. Too much of the data from one survey can’t be combined with the data from another to add it up into something with more statistical power. Standards and protocols are being invented again and again from scratch, and huge inefficiencies are being created every day.

A third problem is data sharing. Famously, when the Ebola epidemic broke out, valuable time was wasted negotiating how data from mobile phone records could be shared and analysed to help provide the information to track the epidemic. That shouldn’t happen, but it will happen, again and again, unless public-private partnerships are worked out to share data when the next disaster hits, wherever that is.

A global partnership on data could solve real, everyday problems like these. But it would also serve a second purpose. A partnership would create something lasting out of the current excitement around data. The activities and the focus of the partnership would change over time, but just having it would make sure that data has advocates once political attention inevitably moves on to something else.

This is what global institutions do. They all operate in different ways, but the Open Government Partnership is a constant voice arguing for greater openness; GAVI will remind the world why vaccines are important even when minds are focused elsewhere; and the Global Partnership for Education is always there to speak up for the out-of-school. However constituted, a global partnership on data would be a constant voice on the global scene reminding people of the importance of better data, and galvanising resources and action to that end. If you care about better data, that has to be a good thing.

And it’s this long term commitment that will be needed to support the myriad country-level data revolutions that are at the heart of the change that is needed. These won’t happen overnight – someone has to be there for the long haul, to work with the civil society groups campaigning for open data, to link up the national statistical offices in one country who are grappling with the problems that another country solved two years ago, to show how partnerships of all the key actors: government, private sector and civil society can work together to increase both the demand for and the supply of good quality data. There are many great initiatives already underway in this area, not least the Paris21 partnership, but a bigger, more high-level global effort could coordinate and support these efforts by raising political profile, building broader relationships, and generating the kind of momentum that can really deliver results.

In a few years’ time, probably no one will care about the ‘data revolution’. But a global partnership on data could be a lasting legacy of this moment, and can be part of continuous improvements in the data on which we all depend.

Last week, the poor souls who are responsible for shepherding the post-2015 negotiations (the UN ambassadors of Kenya and Ireland) released a proposal that was intended to show how this could be done.

Sadly, they have made some of the targets better rather than worse, indicating that ‘technical proofing’ – an expert-driven process supposedly stripped of political overtones – is no sure fire way to a better development agenda.

(And who on earth thought it could be? Experts disagree with each other more bitterly than governments do – fortunately they lack armies with which to settle their arguments.)

So here are five ways the tweaked targets are worse than the originals. Continue reading →

This afternoon, in New York, the OECD is launching its States of Fragility 2015 report which explores how new sustainable development goals and targets (SDGs) can be implemented in countries and communities that lack the political stability and institutions to support inclusive growth, or that are affected by very high levels of violence.

The report was written with colleagues at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and is part of a broader effort to switch the focus from what should be part of the post-2015 development agenda, towards how the new agenda can be delivered.

It argues that we have no hope of delivering the SDGs in large parts of the world, unless we get serious about tackling fragility.

Robust global growth, and more equitable patterns of distribution, have the potential to lead to rapid and continued further reductions in all forms of poverty, but this would mean that those left behind would increasingly live in fragile situations. Continue reading →

The chances of Britain making it through to May 7 without facing at least one unexpected international event with serious implications for our national interests are slim indeed. Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband should be planning to give over at least a day between now and polling to lay out how they intend to shape world events and not just react to them. Even if they remain unpersuaded that the electorate is hungry for answers now, it is difficult to see how they could claim a later mandate for tough decisions if they don’t hint at their direction of travel on ISIS, Russia, China, the Transatlantic relationship, Syria, reform of the European Union, and prospects for this year’s critical summits on sustainable development and climate change.

You can read the whole piece here and see all the other world election coverage they are gathering together here.

They call it an “indaba” – a word in several African languages for a gathering where a community gets together to resolve the problems that affect them all. But it is no community meeting – it is the world’s largest meeting of the mining industry, where the rich and powerful from across the world gather in a plush Cape Town conference centre to determine where will be mined and who will get the money. It is a meeting, in its own words, “dedicated to the capitalisation and development of mining interests in Africa,” at which “a powerful group … make the vital relationships to sustain their investment interests”. In the front rooms the delegates are entertained by Goldman Sachs, Dambisa Moyo and Tony Blair. In the back rooms mining corporations meet to cut secret deals with friendly governments and pressure any governments who have started making trouble.

Through the huge glass windows the delegates can see protests. But they don’t get to hear what the protesters have to say. They dismiss them as anti-mining, anti-progress. It is easy to complain, argue the mining indaba attendees, but would you really want an end to all mining?

No, say campaigners, who gathered in much less comfortable surroundings a few miles for an “alternative indaba”. When I get to hear the stories of some of the participants of the alternative indaba I get to understand that theirs is not a case “against mining” but for accountability. The problem they highlight is not the existence of mining but a harmful imbalance of power that renders mining corporations a law unto themselves. Here’s what I heard from activists from across Africa:

“The sharing agreements on mining deals in our country are secret. So we the public don’t know what our national wealth has been sold for. After pressure, permission was given to MPs to view these long and complicated agreements in a specific room for a set period of time without taking notes, so we’re starting to get a picture but we can’t get final confirmation. From what we’re seeing it looks like a really bad deal indeed – which is why it is secret in the first place.”

“Our laws require that a set percentage of the proceeds must go to the community, yet we find places where the mining company has now finished and left, the environment has been trashed, and the community’s share was never provided.”

“Many of our officials and ministers and their family members are private shareholders or on the pay of the mining corporations, officially or unofficially, so when we challenge the corporations we are challenging the government.”

“The fines for mining companies who break the laws are so low that the mining corporations happily factor them in as a cost of business.”

“When we revealed illegal water pollution by a diamond mine, it was not the mining corporation who were arrested, but us.”

“Our government is finally standing up to mining corporations and demanding they pay their fair share of tax. But neighbouring governments have shown absolutely no solidarity. The AU has to work much more closely together. We cannot have a race to the bottom.”

“When you start to engage the mining corporations you hope to change them, but if you are not careful they can end up changing you. After we criticised a mining corporation they invited us for a tour so, they said, we could see that they were not as we had said. At the end of the tour they tried to present us with gems ‘as a souvenir gift’. We told them we were not allowed to accept hospitality. The message was clear.”

Campaigners are asking governments to hold mining corporations to account for: open, transparent, agreements so citizens know what is happening with their national wealth; paying their fair share of taxes; free, prior and informed consent, so that acquiring communities’ land requires that communities agree; paying fair wages, protecting workers’ health and safety and respecting workers’ rights to organise; and obeying environmental laws. And they are demanding that mining corporations stop their lobbying for a lowering of these basic standards.

That’s not a charter for the end of mining. It’s a proposal that would ensure that mining really did benefit the people from under whose feet the wealth is taken.

Extreme inequality of wealth has fostered an extreme inequality of power. The widening gap and imbalance of power between the richest and the rest is warping the rules and policies that affect all of us in society, creating a vicious circle of ever growing and harmful undue influence. The mining industry’s new Scramble for Africa is making this worse.

The current imbalance of power means that governments, who should be overseeing corporations and protecting citizens, are instead protecting corporations and overseeing citizens. What should bring prosperity is bring instead bringing misery, and legitimate challenge to the mining industry is being met not with answers but with brute force, the violence of the entitled 1%.

The proposal put forward by the mining industry’s critics is not an end to mining but an insistence on real democracy. They are saying that what’s mined is yours. Which is exactly why the mining industry is so determined to keep them down.

Global Dashboard explores global risks and international affairs, bringing together authors who work on foreign policy in think tanks, government, academia, and the media. It was set up in 2007 and is edited from the UK by Alex Evans and David Steven. Read more here